Lauris Dorothy Edmond (née Scott, 2 April 1924 – 28 January 2000) was a New Zealand poet and writer. Biography Born in Dannevirke, Hawke's Bay, Edmond survived the 1931 Napier earthquake as a child. Trained as a teacher, she raised a family before publishing the poetry she had privately written throughout her life. Following her first book, In Middle Air, written in 1975, she published many volumes of poetry, a novel, an autobiography (Hot October, 1989) and several plays. Her Selected Poems (1984) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Edmond wrote poetry throughout her life but decided to publish her first collection of verse, In Middle Air, only in 1975, at the age of 51. The work was awarded the PEN Best First Book Award for 1975. She began her editorial activities in 1979, and in 1980 published a selection of poems by Chris Ward. In 1981 she edited the letters of A.R.D. Fairburn (1904–1957), a noted New Zealand poet of an earlier generation. It was a bold move on her part as the writer in question was not known for his progressive views, but the publication established her as an all‑round woman of letters. At the same time she received the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship, which enabled her to stay in the south of France for several months. Edmond's first work of prose was High Country Weather, a book billed as a novel though in fact an extended short‑story of a deeply biographical character, telling – however veiledly – the story of her own incompatible marriage to Trevor Edmond (1920–1990); it was published in 1984, at about the time of her real‑life marriage's dissolution. The feminist awakening marked by that book was sustained in a collection of other women's 'stories' published under her co‑editorship two years later. As Janet Wilson wrote in The Guardian, "She was friend to several generations of women, especially writers, who admired her as a pioneer for breaking with social convention and carving out a successful literary life at a time when this seemed risky". In 1985 Edmond won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for her Selected Poems. The following year, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, for services to poetry, in the 1986 Queen's Birthday Honours. Additionally, in 1987 she received the Lilian Ida Smith Award from PEN New Zealand; in 1988 New Zealand's Massey University awarded her an honorary